OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Evaluating AI-Enabled deception vulnerability amongst Sub-Saharan-Africa migrants
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2026
Year: 2026

In this study, the vulnerability of Sub-Saharan African migrants to AI-enabled deception, specifically the risk of exposure to scams targeting them, was evaluated. I hypothesized that the ability to distinguish human-generated content from AI-generated content had far-reaching implications beyond content assessment to determining vulnerability to AI-enabled deception. Data collected from a survey of 31 professionals and migrants from SSA across Europe and North America, covering themes on Demographics and Transnational Context, Core AI Literacy and Vulnerability, Mitigation and Trust, was modelled using a hybrid Structural Equation Model and Multiple Linear Regression. The results indicated that the strongest indicator of vulnerability to AI-enabled deception, such as scam, was prior exposure to targeting, as targeting has previously been noted to be, in most cases, a calculated attempt. Confidence in the ability to identify AI content as well as the behavioral characteristics of high verification effort, emerged as significant protective factors that could lower the vulnerability to AI enabled deception. Other transnational contexts such as duration spent abroad or engaging in international fund remittance were found to have a small and insignificant effect on vulnerability.
Scale Dependent Data Duplication
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Data duplication during pretraining can degrade generalization and lead to memorization, motivating aggressive deduplication pipelines. However, at web scale, it is unclear what constitutes a ``duplicate'': beyond surface-form matches, semantically equivalent documents (e.g. translations) may induce redundant training signals once models become sufficiently capable. Practically, this means that semantic duplicates operate increasingly like exact duplicates during training. We present evidence that duplication is scale-dependent in two ways. First, as model capability increases, cross-entropy loss gradients for semantically equivalent documents become more aligned. Smaller models, by contrast, produce gradients that reflect surface similarity (e.g., shared tokens) rather than semantic similarity. Second, we embedded all 192 million FineWeb-Edu-Dedup documents using EmbeddingGemma-300m. For moderate corpus sizes, the cosine similarity between nearest-neighbors follows an isotropic power law baseline. However, as corpus size grows to hundreds of billions of tokens, the nearest-neighbor similarities deviate sharply, indicating accelerated semantic collisions. Finally, controlled pretraining on data sampled with replacement from pools of finite unique documents shows that limited uniqueness yields mild degradation for small models, but rapidly increasing loss penalties for larger models, breaking naive scaling extrapolation. We derive explicit scaling laws that allow practitioners to estimate deviation from expected scaling due to limited semantic uniqueness of the pretraining corpus. Our results identify and resolve an unstudied source of scale-dependence, allowing for more accurate prediction at scale.
Consensus is Not Verification: Why Crowd Wisdom Strategies Fail for LLM Truthfulness
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Pass@k and other methods of scaling inference compute can improve language model performance in domains with external verifiers, including mathematics and code, where incorrect candidates can be filtered reliably. This raises a natural question: can we similarly scale compute to elicit gains in truthfulness for domains without convenient verification? We show that across five benchmarks and models, surprisingly, it cannot. Even at 25x the inference cost of naive sampling, polling-style aggregation yields no consistent accuracy gains over single-sample baselines and often amplifies shared misconceptions. We find that under uncertainty, models are better at predicting what other models will say within model ensembles than at identifying what is true, revealing a separation between social prediction and truth verification. Across models and benchmarks, aggregation fails to provide a robust truth signal because language model errors are strongly correlated. The source of correlation goes beyond any individual benchmark: we show that even when conditioned on out of distribution random strings and asked to produce pseudo-random outputs, different models produce correlated outputs. Confidence-based weighting provides no benefit because self-reported confidence fails to reliably distinguish correct from incorrect answers. These results delineate a boundary for inference-time scaling: in verified domains, additional samples provide more candidates for a verifier to filter; in unverified domains, additional samples merely reinforce shared misconceptions.
OptiRoulette Optimizer: A New Stochastic Meta-Optimizer for up to 5.3x Faster Convergence
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

This paper presents OptiRoulette, a stochastic meta-optimizer that selects update rules during training instead of fixing a single optimizer. The method combines warmup optimizer locking, random sampling from an active optimizer pool, compatibility-aware learning-rate scaling during optimizer transitions, and failure-aware pool replacement. OptiRoulette is implemented as a drop-in, "torch.optim.Optimizer-compatible" component and packaged for pip installation. We report completed 10-seed results on five image-classification suites: CIFAR-100, CIFAR-100-C, SVHN, Tiny ImageNet, and Caltech-256. Against a single-optimizer AdamW baseline, OptiRoulette improves mean test accuracy from 0.6734 to 0.7656 on CIFAR-100 (+9.22 percentage points), 0.2904 to 0.3355 on CIFAR-100-C (+4.52), 0.9667 to 0.9756 on SVHN (+0.89), 0.5669 to 0.6642 on Tiny ImageNet (+9.73), and 0.5946 to 0.6920 on Caltech-256 (+9.74). Its main advantage is convergence reliability at higher targets: it reaches CIFAR-100/CIFAR-100-C 0.75, SVHN 0.96, Tiny ImageNet 0.65, and Caltech-256 0.62 validation accuracy in 10/10 runs, while the AdamW baseline reaches none of these targets within budget. On shared targets, OptiRoulette also reduces time-to-target (e.g., Caltech-256 at 0.59: 25.7 vs 77.0 epochs). Paired-seed deltas are positive on all datasets; CIFAR-100-C test ROC-AUC is the only metric not statistically significant in the current 10-seed study.
Evo: Autoregressive-Diffusion Large Language Models with Evolving Balance
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

We introduce \textbf{Evo}, a duality latent trajectory model that bridges autoregressive (AR) and diffusion-based language generation within a continuous evolutionary generative framework. Rather than treating AR decoding and diffusion generation as separate paradigms, Evo reconceptualizes text generation as a latent flow: each token is associated with a vector-valued embedding that evolves over a progression variable $t_i \in [0, 1]$, indicating its semantic maturity. Low $t_i$ values correspond to confident AR-like refinement, while high values invoke diffusion-style planning, allowing the model to adaptively balance AR and diffusion based on uncertainty. Theoretically, we show that both AR and diffusion models emerge as discretizations of a shared probability flow, and we derive Evo's training objective from a unified variational ELBO. The model is implemented as a time-conditioned Transformer governed by a shared vector field, trained end-to-end to jointly infer latent codes and their progression times. During decoding, Evo performs efficient, semantics-aware refinement, achieving high-quality outputs without sacrificing speed. Empirically, Evo 8B achieves state-of-the-art or highly competitive results on 15 diverse benchmarks, including reasoning (GSM8K, ARC-C), code generation (HumanEval, MBPP), and general language understanding, while maintaining fast inference speed. Our results demonstrate that Evo delivers a new paradigm for LLM design with strong generation quality, robust symbolic reasoning, and decoding efficiency.
Exploration Space Theory: Formal Foundations for Prerequisite-Aware Location-Based Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2026
Year: 2026

Location-based recommender systems have achieved considerable sophistication, yet none provides a formal, lattice-theoretic representation of prerequisite dependencies among points of interest -- the semantic reality that meaningfully experiencing certain locations presupposes contextual knowledge gained from others -- nor the structural guarantees that such a representation entails. We introduce Exploration Space Theory (EST), a formal framework that transposes Knowledge Space Theory into location-based recommendation. We prove that the valid user exploration states -- the order ideals of a surmise partial order on points of interest -- form a finite distributive lattice and a well-graded learning space; Birkhoff's representation theorem, combined with the structural isomorphism between lattices of order ideals and concept lattices, connects the exploration space canonically to Formal Concept Analysis. These structural results yield four direct consequences: linear-time fringe computation, a validity certificate guaranteeing that every fringe-guided recommendation is a structurally sound next step, sub-path optimality for dynamic-programming path generation, and provably existing structural explanations for every recommendation. Building on these foundations, we specify the Exploration Space Recommender System (ESRS) -- a memoized dynamic program over the exploration lattice, a Bayesian state estimator with beam approximation and EM parameter learning, an online feedback loop enforcing the downward-closure invariant, an incremental surmise-relation inference pipeline, and three cold-start strategies, the structural one being the only approach in the literature to provide a formal validity guarantee conditional on the correctness of the inferred surmise relation. All results are established through proof and illustrated on a fully traced five-POI numerical example.
Roots Beneath the Cut: Uncovering the Risk of Concept Revival in Pruning-Based Unlearning for Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Pruning-based unlearning has recently emerged as a fast, training-free, and data-independent approach to remove undesired concepts from diffusion models. It promises high efficiency and robustness, offering an attractive alternative to traditional fine-tuning or editing-based unlearning. However, in this paper we uncover a hidden danger behind this promising paradigm. We find that the locations of pruned weights, typically set to zero during unlearning, can act as side-channel signals that leak critical information about the erased concepts. To verify this vulnerability, we design a novel attack framework capable of reviving erased concepts from pruned diffusion models in a fully data-free and training-free manner. Our experiments confirm that pruning-based unlearning is not inherently secure, as erased concepts can be effectively revived without any additional data or retraining. Extensive experiments on diffusion-based unlearning based on concept related weights lead to the conclusion: once the critical concept-related weights in diffusion models are identified, our method can effectively recover the original concept regardless of how the weights are manipulated. Finally, we explore potential defense strategies and advocate safer pruning mechanisms that conceal pruning locations while preserving unlearning effectiveness, providing practical insights for designing more secure pruning-based unlearning frameworks.
How the Graph Construction Technique Shapes Performance in IoT Botnet Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2026
Year: 2026

The increasing incidence of IoT-based botnet attacks has driven interest in advanced learning models for detection. Recent efforts have focused on leveraging attention mechanisms to model long-range feature dependencies and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to capture relationships between data instances. Since GNNs require graph-structured input, tabular NetFlow data must be transformed accordingly. This study evaluates how the choice of the method for constructing the graph-structured dataset impacts the classification performance of a GNN model. Five methods--k-Nearest Neighbors, Mutual Nearest Neighbors, Shared Nearest Neighbor, Gabriel Graph, and epsilon-radius Graph--were evaluated in this research. To reduce the computational burden associated with high-dimensional data, a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is employed to project the original features into a lower-dimensional latent space prior to graph generation. Subsequently, a Graph Attention Network (GAT) is trained on each graph to classify traffic in the N-BaIoT dataset into three categories: Normal, Mirai, and Gafgyt. The results indicate that using Gabriel graph achieves the highest detection performance with an accuracy of 97.56% while SNN recorded the lowest performance with an accuracy as low as 78.56%.
Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search for Modern AI: A Projection-Augmented Graph Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2026
Year: 2026

Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (ANNS) is fundamental to modern AI applications. Most existing solutions optimize query efficiency but fail to align with the practical requirements of modern workloads. In this paper, we outline six critical demands of modern AI applications: high query efficiency, fast indexing, low memory footprint, scalability to high dimensionality, robustness across varying retrieval sizes, and support for online insertions. To satisfy all these demands, we introduce Projection-Augmented Graph (PAG), a new ANNS framework that integrates projection techniques into a graph index. PAG reduces unnecessary exact distance computations through asymmetric comparisons between exact and approximate distances as guided by projection-based statistical tests. Three key components are designed and unified to the graph index to optimize indexing and searching. Experiments on six modern datasets demonstrate that PAG consistently achieves superior query per second (QPS)-recall performance -- up to 5x faster than HNSW -- while offering fast indexing speed and moderate memory footprint. PAG remains robust as dimensionality and retrieval size increase and naturally supports online insertions.
Better Eyes, Better Thoughts: Why Vision Chain-of-Thought Fails in Medicine
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Large vision-language models (VLMs) often benefit from chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting in general domains, yet its efficacy in medical vision-language tasks remains underexplored. We report a counter-intuitive trend: on medical visual question answering, CoT frequently underperforms direct answering (DirA) across general-purpose and medical-specific models. We attribute this to a \emph{medical perception bottleneck}: subtle, domain-specific cues can weaken visual grounding, and CoT may compound early perceptual uncertainty rather than correct it. To probe this hypothesis, we introduce two training-free, inference-time grounding interventions: (i) \emph{perception anchoring} via region-of-interest cues and (ii) \emph{description grounding} via high-quality textual guidance. Across multiple benchmarks and model families, these interventions improve accuracy, mitigate CoT degradation, and in several settings reverse the CoT--DirA inversion. Our findings suggest that reliable clinical VLMs require robust visual grounding and cross-modal alignment, beyond extending text-driven reasoning chains. Code is available \href{https://github.com/TianYin123/Better_Eyes_Better_Thoughts}{here}.
SDN-SYN PoW: Intent-Aware Adaptive SDN Defense with PoW Against multi-domain SYN Floods
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2026
Year: 2026

The stability of Internet services is persistently challenged by the escalating scale of volumetric TCP SYN floods, as conventional defenses like SYN Cookies fail by exacerbating bandwidth depletion under modern attacks. This paper introduces SDN-SYN PoW, a novel defense architecture that synergizes non-interactive Proof-of-Work with a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) control plane, an approach particularly effective for securing the network edge in modern SD-WAN deployments. The core innovation is its ability to perform global network sensing; the SDN controller monitors real-time traffic to dynamically adjust PoW difficulty, transforming the defense from a static mechanism into an intelligent, adaptive system that surgically applies computational costs only to anomalous sources. Through rigorous experiments on a custom-built testbed, we demonstrate that SDN-SYN PoW provides substantially superior protection and, critically, that the PoW overhead remains negligible for legitimate clients, ensuring compatibility even with low-power devices.
AutoFigure-Edit: Generating Editable Scientific Illustration
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

High-quality scientific illustrations are essential for communicating complex scientific and technical concepts, yet existing automated systems remain limited in editability, stylistic controllability, and efficiency. We present AutoFigure-Edit, an end-to-end system that generates fully editable scientific illustrations from long-form scientific text while enabling flexible style adaptation through user-provided reference images. By combining long-context understanding, reference-guided styling, and native SVG editing, it enables efficient creation and refinement of high-quality scientific illustrations. To facilitate further progress in this field, we release the video at https://youtu.be/10IH8SyJjAQ, full codebase at https://github.com/ResearAI/AutoFigure-Edit and provide a website for easy access and interactive use at https://deepscientist.cc/.
One step further with Monte-Carlo sampler to guide diffusion better
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Stochastic differential equation (SDE)-based generative models have achieved substantial progress in conditional generation via training-free differentiable loss-guided approaches. However, existing methodologies utilizing posterior sam- pling typically confront a substantial estimation error, which results in inaccu- rate gradients for guidance and leading to inconsistent generation results. To mitigate this issue, we propose that performing an additional backward denois- ing step and Monte-Carlo sampling (ABMS) can achieve better guided diffu- sion, which is a plug-and-play adjustment strategy. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we provide theoretical analysis and propose the adoption of a dual-focus evaluation framework, which further serves to highlight the critical problem of cross-condition interference prevalent in existing approaches. We conduct experiments across various task settings and data types, mainly includ- ing conditional online handwritten trajectory generation, image inverse problems (inpainting, super resolution and gaussian deblurring) molecular inverse design and so on. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can be effec- tively used with higher order samplers and consistently improves the quality of generation samples across all the different scenarios.
Spectral Gaps and Spatial Priors: Studying Hyperspectral Downstream Adaptation Using TerraMind
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Geospatial Foundation Models (GFMs) typically lack native support for Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) due to the complexity and sheer size of high-dimensional spectral data. This study investigates the adaptability of TerraMind, a multimodal GFM, to address HSI downstream tasks \emph{without} HSI-specific pretraining. Therefore, we implement and compare two channel adaptation strategies: Naive Band Selection and physics-aware Spectral Response Function (SRF) grouping. Overall, our results indicate a general superiority of deep learning models with native support of HSI data. Our experiments also demonstrate the ability of TerraMind to adapt to HSI downstream tasks through band selection with moderate performance decline. Therefore, the findings of this research establish a critical baseline for HSI integration, motivating the need for native spectral tokenization in future multimodal model architectures.
Soft Equivariance Regularization for Invariant Self-Supervised Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Self-supervised learning (SSL) typically learns representations invariant to semantic-preserving augmentations. While effective for recognition, enforcing strong invariance can suppress transformation-dependent structure that is useful for robustness to geometric perturbations and spatially sensitive transfer. A growing body of work, therefore, augments invariance-based SSL with equivariance objectives, but these objectives are often imposed on the same final representation. We empirically observe a trade-off in this coupled setting: pushing equivariance regularization toward deeper layers improves equivariance scores but degrades ImageNet-1k linear evaluation, motivating a layer-decoupled design. Motivated by this trade-off, we propose Soft Equivariance Regularization (SER), a plug-in regularizer that decouples where invariance and equivariance are enforced: we keep the base SSL objective unchanged on the final embedding, while softly encouraging equivariance on an intermediate spatial token map via analytically specified group actions $ρ_g$ applied directly in feature space. SER learns/predicts no per-sample transformation codes/labels, requires no auxiliary transformation-prediction head, and adds only 1.008x training FLOPs. On ImageNet-1k ViT-S/16 pretraining, SER improves MoCo-v3 by +0.84 Top-1 in linear evaluation under a strictly matched 2-view setting and consistently improves DINO and Barlow Twins; under matched view counts, SER achieves the best ImageNet-1k linear-eval Top-1 among the compared invariance+equivariance add-ons. SER further improves ImageNet-C/P by +1.11/+1.22 Top-1 and frozen-backbone COCO detection by +1.7 mAP. Finally, applying the same layer-decoupling recipe to existing invariance+equivariance baselinesimproves their accuracy, suggesting layer decoupling as a general design principle for combining invariance and equivariance.
HARP: HARmonizing in-vivo diffusion MRI using Phantom-only training
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Purpose: Combining multi-site diffusion MRI (dMRI) data is hindered by inter-scanner variability, which confounds subsequent analysis. Previous harmonization methods require large, matched or traveling human subjects from multiple sites, which are impractical to acquire in many situations. This study aims to develop a deep learning-based dMRI harmonization framework that eliminates the reliance on multi-site in-vivo traveling human data for training. Methods: HARP employs a voxel-wise 1D neural network trained on an easily transportable diffusion phantom. The model learns relationships between spherical harmonics coefficients of different sites without memorizing spatial structures. Results: HARP reduced inter-scanner variability levels significantly in various measures. Quantitatively, it decreased inter-scanner variability as measured by standard error in FA (12%), MD (10%), and GFA (30%) with scan-rescan standard error as the baseline, while preserving fiber orientations and tractography after harmonization. Conclusion: We believe that HARP represents an important first step toward dMRI harmonization using only phantom data, thereby obviating the need for complex, matched in vivo multi-site cohorts. This phantom-only strategy substantially enhances the feasibility and scalability of quantitative dMRI for large-scale clinical studies.